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Skrastins had a long road to Avalanche from Latvia
Defenseman was one of those killed in Russian hockey team plane crash
Editor's note: This story originally ran on Feb. 6, 2007. The Denver Post reran it with the news that a plane carrying a KHL hockey team crashed in western Russia, killing at least 43 people, including Skrastins, who played in Colorado from 2003-08. When the Avalanche's Karlis Skrastins — who can tie Tim Horton 's NHL record for consecutive games played by a defenseman tonight against Florida — was being raised in Latvia, it was part of the Soviet Union. His homeland along the Baltic Sea still bore the emotional scars of German occupation during World War II, when as many as 85,000 of its Jewish citizens were murdered and Latvian deaths reached as high as 200,000. Under the post-war Soviet regime, nationalism in the Baltic region — Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — was muted or risky.
